Ungraceful handling of topic being locked while posting a reply

[MartinHowe]

I was posting a reply to this viewtopic.php?t=76162 and when I clicked "submit" it came back with "This topic has been locked to further replies". I guess it must have been locked while I was typing; in fact, the last post was now a link to a thread recommended by the admins as being more appropriate for discussion of such things.

That's acceptable; what it not is that when I pressed "back" to retrieve my carefully typed and thought out text in the text box, it was gone! At least it should have remained in the text box so I can copy and use it elsewhere. There really needs to be a graceful way of handling a thread being locked while somebody is typing a reply so that they don't get a nasty shock when they click "submit". Is this possible?

Maybe have when the user clicks "submit" on a thread that has been locked while they were replying to it, have the "This thread is locked" popup show but without navigating away from the reply page? That gives the user time to copy their text and save it somewhere before abandoning the page.

[Rachael]

This unfortunately is fairly complicated - it happens because of cache invalidation on the browser-side. It's supposed to work that way in order to inform you there's an update to a page when you jump back to it - but sadly it does lose your inputs when you lose the input box that you typed it into.